Jon Talton - Dry Heat

Barely audibly, Pham said, “Begin operation.”

Peralta turned and walked outside. It didn’t take much to bore him, especially if it was a multi-jurisdictional operation like this one. I decided to follow him. Just as I stepped onto the ground, I heard a muffled “whump.” Turning toward the house, I saw a flash and heard another concussion. From the command center I heard someone call, “Showtime.”

Peralta faced toward the action, his hands behind his back, his powerful shoulders tensed.

“You think they’ll screw it up, don’t you?” I said, trying to ease my own anxiety, tamp down my hope that Lindsey and I might be reunited soon.

“What I think doesn’t matter, Mapstone.”

“What about what you know?”

He faced me, one black eyebrow barely raised.

“The Pilgrim case,” I said. “You know more than you’re telling me.”

He studied me with a slow orbit of his eyes. “The Kate Vare thing? Don’t be paranoid, Mapstone. She was convinced you were holding out on her about some vagrant chick you interviewed. She was raising a stink with Chief Wilson and the county supervisors, so it seemed easy enough to let her check the files in your office. Don’t worry, we didn’t disturb your precious library of history books.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“What then?” he asked, his voice suddenly impatient.

I was about to launch into it when we heard an unmistakable crackle from the direction of the house, then expletives from the command center. Peralta hurried back in, and I followed him enough to stand in the doorway.

“…taking fire…one suspect is down. He’s down in the kitchen. An officer is down. Officer down…”

“How many do we think are in there?” I asked, and was ignored. Over my shoulder, the sound of automatic weapons fire had become steady. But these were short bursts, apparently from both sides. We were dealing with trained, disciplined scumbags inside that three-million-dollar pile of rocks.

Then the only sounds were wind and traffic.

“Building is secure. Building is secure. We have one officer down and four suspects down. Send in medics.”

Two ambulances were flagged through the roadblock, escorted by a Scottsdale PD unit. The tightness in my gut started to let up a little.

Someone shouted, “One of ’em’s unaccounted for. Hang on…”

Then, after a few centuries: “Yuri. Yuri’s not among the suspects.”

I stepped back outside, as if propelled by the Russian’s dark magic. My hand clutched the butt of the Colt Python, as if Yuri would suddenly appear from around the corner of the bus and kill us all. It didn’t seem impossible. The dust storm was full upon us now, the wind coming in hard horizontal bursts. The timeless logic of the desert trying to reclaim its own. The mountains were no more than a quarter mile away, but I could only see murky oblivion in that direction. I closed my eyes against the flying particles and prepared to step inside the command center. But a bulk came the other way, nearly knocking me down. Peralta.

“Let’s go,” he said, a rare wild look in his eyes.

“What?”

He spun me and pushed me like I weighed ninety pounds. Behind me, “Goddamn it, David, let’s go!”

I ran to the car. Peralta was right behind me, but he had retrieved a shotgun from one of the cruisers.

“Go!” he ordered. I assumed he meant to the house, so I blew past a befuddled deputy and aimed the Oldsmobile up Thompson Peak Parkway, then into a side road and quickly climbed into the foothills. Getting closer, I saw the ambulances and sheriff’s cruisers pull around to a wide driveway where a gazillion-car garage was built into the rocky face of the hillside. Medics were talking to one of the ninja tactical guys.

Then everything changed.

One of the tasteful desert-toned garage doors disintegrated. Pieces were still midair when the grillwork of a Hummer exploded out of the garage.

“Get off the road,” Peralta said, almost to himself.

But I was already ahead of him. Old cop intuition, which was hardwired in me by training and by four years on the street, had come alive like some forgotten tribal knowledge. I braked hard and slammed the gearshift to “R.” The Olds responded with a primal “clunk” deep in the rear end-no digital pulses from twenty-first-century auto technology here-but the car moved backwards at once. I quickly slid into the hard desert ground, uprooting a stand of prickly pear and brittle-bush.

“Oh, hell,” Peralta said. I looked toward the house and an FBI ATV and its rider were crashing to the ground on a trajectory from the Hummer. Next it slammed across the top of the sheriff’s cruiser, whose hood gave way under the Hummer’s jacked-up tires. The cruiser’s windshield shattered and the tires blew out. By then the Hummer was on the road and flying past us. It was the same black Hummer from that day in Roosevelt.

“Follow him,” Peralta commanded.

“What?”

“Goddamn it, David, go!”

I eased the Olds out of the scrub and onto the asphalt. Then I punched the accelerator into the floor.

If the Russian had taken off across the desert, we never would have caught him. Instead, he wheeled out onto Scottsdale Road and turned south, toward the city. This was the racetrack for the rich and famous, but the black Hummer quickly passed a clot of SUVs and pricey sedans doing a mere sixty and commandeered a clear stretch of the slow lane. Within a mile, the speedometer on the Olds, with its long thin numbers and circular dial from the industrial designers of the 1960s, was pushing one hundred.

“How the hell can he go this fast?” I panted, feeling barely in control of the car. “I thought SUVs were lead sleds.”

“Maybe not,” Peralta said. “Don’t let him get on the freeway!”

“And I’m going to stop him how?” I yelled.

The clear stretch didn’t last long. As we neared Bell Road, I could see a parking lot of commuters, looking forward to happy weekends or fights with the spouse, spread out in four directions. Dust careened across the road in swirls and wild patterns. Headlights were lost to the gusts. Traffic was stuck at the entrances of the 101 beltway, whose concrete mass swooped over our heads. The Hummer barely slowed. I’d kept him off the freeway.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, braking down to eighty, taking the left-turn lane and honking the big Detroit claxon to clear cars away. The Russian jerked to the right, through a forest of red cones cordoning off some street-widening. Across the aircraft-carrier deck of Oldsmobile hood, I watched as cones, dust, wood, unidentifiable debris, and finally steel reinforcing rods flew off in the Hummer’s wake. He cut back into the slow lane, sending a panicked Lexus into a 360-degree spin-I could make out a plume of blond hair inside the driver’s window-and ending up glancing off the door of a shiny Lincoln Navigator. I heard horns and crashes but didn’t have time to watch. The Hummer blew through the chaos, crossed Bell against the light, and sped south. Somehow, after jagging into oncoming traffic and nearly taking out a light post, I was right behind him.

Now the needle was insistently pushing against 120. I still had an inch or so under my foot. The former owner, the drug dealer, had helpfully added new shoulder harnesses and seat belts. I steered with one hand and buckled up with the other.

“Where’s the cavalry?” I wondered aloud. The dust storm made it impossible to get choppers in the air, but I looked in vain for police emergency lights coming behind us. I could hear Peralta on his cell phone.

“They’re setting out stop sticks at Doubletree,” he said above the din of canvas roof and wind. “Just keep going straight, you son of a bitch.”